AMD’s new Radeon Pro Duo claims double the performance of a Titan X

AMD has a new Radeon Pro Duo built atop its most recent Polaris architecture and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. Featuring dual Polaris graphics processors (GPU) and a mammoth 32GB of GDDR5 memory, AMD claims it is capable of delivering performance more than twice an Nvidia GTX Titan X.

With an absence of real competition for Nvidia’s top-of-the-line graphics cards, AMD has released a few zany cards over the past few years. Alongside a $10,000 GPU with its own built-in solid-state storage (SSD), AMD also released the Radeon Pro Duo in 2016. At the time, it was the most powerful single-board graphics card in the world, despite using two GPUs to do it. While the new Radeon Pro Duo cannot match it in terms of raw performance, it is certainly powerful and much more efficient.

Aimed at the professional market, AMD’s new Radeon Pro Duo is built using Polaris chips, based on the same architecture as the WX 7100. The card is designed to excel at media and entertainment, we’re told, though more in a creation sense than the kind you expect to find in an HTPC.

The Polaris Radeon Pro Duo comes with a total of 72 compute units, offering up to 11.45 TFLOPS of performance. It’s said to be capable of handling up to four 4K monitors operating at 60hz, or a single 8K monitor at 30Hz (60Hz with a dual cable solution). We are told that the dual-GPU design of the Radeon Pro Duo lets professionals multi-task, even between demanding applications, like rendering visual effects while creating 3D assets in a secondary program.

Each of the dual cores is clocked at 1,243MHz, with 16GB of memory a piece. The two memory interfaces are 256-bit each.

The big claim AMD makes about this card, though, is its overall performance. While the raw numbers don’t necessarily make it the most powerful card in the world, we’re told that it has “up to two times faster performance compared with the Radeon Pro WX 7100 and up to two times faster performance than the closest competing professional graphics card.”

That wording does seem rather deliberate. In its cited performance numbers, AMD pits the Polaris Radeon Pro Duo against an Nvidia Titan X and does beat it handily in a number of settings, but that’s not the most powerful card Nvidia has anymore. The Titan X falls short of the consumer facing GTX-1080 Ti and the current king of the hill, the Titan XP.

Considering the latter has a cited 12 TFLOPS of computational power, it may be that AMD chose its comparison deliberately here. It could also simply be that the Xp wasn’t available then, since the testing AMD refers to was reportedly conducted on March 25.

That is not to say that the new Radeon Pro Duo wouldn’t beat it, but we don’t know either way. It is certainly a powerful card with a competitive price tag of $1,000.